Vacation 2016

I was on vacation a couple weeks back and went to my favorite place, Martha’s Vineyard. I enjoyed spending time with my wife and daughter, my in-laws, and a few cousins, aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, my son couldn’t make it due to his work schedule and I missed having him there with us. Despite him not being with us, it was a great week and brought back some memories for me.

Coming over to the island on the ferry, there were a lot of families with young kids and I couldn’t help but think back to when my kids were little and we made the trek over. Both my kids loved being on the boat and we’d either be outside or right next to a window. We’d watch the seagulls floating on the air, keeping pace with the boat and swooping in and grabbing a snack from a passenger’s outstretched hand. We’d talk about what we were going to do, which always included the beach, ice cream, and The Flying Horses. Those were some great times.

My wife and I walked up town our first evening there and got an ice cream. There’s nothing like an ice cream on a summer day. It made me think of my childhood and how special a treat it was to pile all the kids in the car, go for a cool off ride, and get an ice cream at the end. Even if our hands and arms were sticky with melted ice cream, it was worth the two hours or so of cooling off before we went back to the house where the only air conditioning was open windows and a big blue fan. Those were also some great times.

As I sat waiting for the fireworks to start on the 4^th of July, I was like a little kid, sitting and fidgeting, wondering why it was taking so long to start. When I was a kid, the town had our fireworks at the Little League fields. We’d walk up as a family, set out a blanket and wait what seemed like an eternity, and finally get to see them. It always seemed like it was too short a time for how long we waited. At some point, they stopped shooting off the fireworks in our town, probably realizing that it wasn’t safe enough where they were doing it. Those were some great times, too.

For the most part, I spent the week without shoes on. As soon as I got to the house, I pulled off the sneakers and socks and just let my feet breathe. It felt so good to go outside and feel the grass between my toes and be in direct contact with the ground. I had to put something on my feet to walk places, but that was it. It reminded me of being a kid and fighting with Mom because she wanted us to always have something on our feet and we didn’t want to. Running around in the yard, why would we need sneakers on? Playing wiffle ball in the yard, who needs sneakers? I knew I could run faster with bare feet. Just sitting around in the shade in our front yard and reading comic books certainly didn’t require something on our feet. Maybe Mom just hated having to clean our dirty feet after a fun day. Those were some really great times.

Vacation is over and it’s back to the real world, but I’ve been trying to go barefoot a little more than I was. I’m going to enjoy it as long as I can because in a few months we’ll have to be wearing socks and shoes, or sneakers, or (gasp) boots. By then my week in paradise will be but a distant memory, but I’ll have some happy feet. And some more great memories. 

Something Is Missing

I was out on my back deck the other day, just kind of surveying the yard, taking it all in as I listened to the birds signing and felt the sun shining on my face. The grass isn’t as thick as I want it, nor is it as green as I want it. The shed looks a little more run down than last year. It’s also probably time I replaced the aging fence back there, too. You probably think all this would get me down, but it really doesn’t, it’s just the state of things right now. What did get me down a little was the gaping spot where the pool used to be.

We used to have an above ground pool in the back until last year when we gave it away. If you have a pool, or have ever had a pool, you know they are a lot of work and cost you more than a few bucks to keep them up and running. We used to think it was a good trade off, because the pool got used all summer long. My kids would have friends over and they would spend the day in and out of the pool, and it kind of became the hangout spot for them. We also used to have friends over who had kids the same age as ours and they’d spend most of the time in the pool. Me, my wife and our kids would go in the pool together when I wasn’t at work. We let people use our pool even if we weren’t home. And then the kids grew up and the pool just didn’t get used much anymore.

That’s the part that got me down, thinking about those times when there was activity in the backyard, water splashing, laughter, and screaming – the kind of noise that was nice to hear. Now there’s a sandy shape of a pool, some crushed stone that was around the edges, and some weeds growing. While I like the sounds of the birds, there is nothing like the sound of kids having fun. It is a sound that still brings joy to my heart.

When I was growing up, we had a pool for a number of years. We went in the pool almost every day those summers, staying in for long stretches of time until our toes and fingers were shriveled like prunes and our eyes were cloudy with chlorine. We’d come out for lunch or a snack and then go back in when Mom said it was okay. We had incredible contests of endurance to see who could hold their breath under water the longest, do the most underwater somersaults, or who could go back and forth underwater the most times without coming up for air. Sometimes, we made whirlpools by going around the edge of the pool and then just floated along with the current until it died. Those were good times.

As we got older, the pool got used less and less until finally, it was taken down. I myself was not sad when that happened, but maybe my parents were. Maybe they felt the same thing I did the other day when they looked out the back window of our house and heard nothing but the birds singing. The sense that something was missing, that time had somehow moved on a little too quickly, and that I should have enjoyed those noisy, pool-filled days a little more than I did, because it’s awfully quiet out there now.

Sick In the Summer

Is there anything worse than being sick? Yes, there is - being sick in the summer. We’re all kind of used to getting sick in the dead of winter, but being sick at the height of summer is just wrong. Summer is supposed to be long, lazy days of friends, fun, and games. It’s supposed to be a time to relax and chill out, not have the chills. So when my son recently was sick for a few days, I really felt for him.

Luckily for him, my wife and I weren’t like my Mom and didn’t make him stay inside for a couple of extra days just to make sure he was truly better. Back when I was growing up, Mom always made us stay in and do next-to-nothing for an extra day after being sick. I don’t really know if it was make sure we were no longer sick or if it was just a deterrent to faking sickness so we could miss a day of school (of course, I never did that!). Either way, I didn’t want to have to stay in the house any longer than I had to, especially in the summer.

Who would want to miss a couple of days of wiffle ball, playing catch, riding bikes, and chasing the ice cream man for a freebie? Certainly not me or any of my old friends. Even on those sauna-like August days when we just sat under a tree and read our comic books or Mad magazine while listening to our AM transistor radios, it was so much better than being cooped up in the house. As you can probably guess, growing up in a family of nine, we had no air conditioners in the house. That is, unless you consider opening up the windows and turning on the big blue fan in the living room air conditioning. I really didn’t care for staying inside.

I remember one summer when I was about 10 years old, I had a headache and was really hot, so I told my Mom. She took my temperature and it turned out that I had a fever. Mom gave me some aspirin (St. Joseph’s aspirin for children, chewable and supposedly orange flavored - blah) and made me go lie on my bed and read so that I would get better quicker. I wasn’t supposed to do anything outside of that bed in my room. While I laid there staring up at the ceiling, contemplating how to get out of the mess I got myself into, I could hear the kids in the neighborhood outside, running around, and doing what I wanted to be doing. I don’t know which made me feel worse, having a fever or hearing my friends having a great time outside.

At some point I fell asleep and woke up a few hours later feeling much better, so I went and told Mom that I was ready to go outside. She politely told me that I still needed to rest, and that I needed to stay in the house. There was no argument, no trying to convince her I was okay, and no chance I was getting out of the house. Maybe, she said, I could go out the next day if kept getting better. Miracle of miracles, I was better the next day. There was absolutely no way I was going to tell her I didn’t feel anything but wonderful. I was going out and I wasn’t going to miss another precious day of vacation. Ah, but Mom had other ideas and I had to stay in another day, “just to make sure.” If I ever got sick in the summer again, I don’t remember telling Mom, because that meant multiple lost days of being outside with friends.

So my son got over whatever he had after a few days and went back to his normal life; work, friends, being out of the house, and enjoying the summer. The amazing part was that this all happened without being forced to stay in the house, up in his room, for one extra day. I wish I could have had that when I was a kid, whether I got sick in the winter, spring, summer, or fall. But like I said, there’s nothing worse than being sick in the summer.

Goofing Around in the Back of the Car

With the start of warm weather, Road Work season is in full swing here in the Northeast. Even though most of it is done overnight, the work can continue past the 6 AM stop time and cause traffic issues for those of us trying to get to work on already busy highways. One day last week that scenario played out for me and I was stuck in a traffic jam about 7 miles away from my exit. After a few minutes I was behind a school transportation van and couldn’t avoid noticing a little girl in the last seat because she was staring straight at me. Once she got my attention, she smiled and waved to me until I waved back.

As we inched up the highway I noticed she was doing the same thing to other cars that were passing the van, with mixed results. A few people waved back and she’d smile and go on to the next car, but most of the people didn’t even acknowledge her existence. When the traffic stopped, she would stare at the car next to her, concentration on her face, just waiting for someone to look at her so she could smile and wave to them. It appeared to me that some people gave their full effort to not look at her. Maybe they didn’t want to smile while sitting in a traffic jam, thinking that maintaining the angry face would make the cars in front of them go faster. In that little girl’s world, traffic jams are not a problem.

That incident reminded me of riding in the back of our station wagon as kids. When we all went somewhere in the car, us younger ones sat in the way back part of the station wagon. Did I mention there were no seats back there? Back in those days, seat belts were not required and no one used them, so for us to be sitting back there was no big deal. We could have a lot of fun in the back end of the car. There were many opportunities to annoy my older brothers sitting in the back seat: I could simulate a bug crawling on their neck; I could pull their hair and duck down behind the seat; I could tap their shoulder so they looked at the person sitting next to them and then laugh at them for falling for that old trick; I could sing really loud and/or off-key right behind their ear. Yes, there were lots of things I could do and they couldn’t do anything because we were in the car. As long as I didn’t hear Dad say “If I have to pull this car over...” I felt like it was anything goes.

When bugging my older brothers got boring we’d play games back there, like counting the number of cars of a certain color, or looking for cars from other states if we were on the highway. If we weren’t driving on the highway, we’d exaggerate the turns and roll into each other or amplify the bumps and bang the roof. Eventually, it would get out of hand and Dad would give us the old “If I have to pull this car over…” bit again and we’d calm down – at least for a while. At one point, we had a station wagon that had a third seat – that faced back instead of front. I don’t know whose brilliant marketing plan that was, but you could only fit two kids in it comfortably, it forced you stare at people behind you and it kind of made you feel nauseous going backwards all the time. Besides, it was no fun in the back if you couldn’t even roll around a little bit. I think we just folded the seat down and didn’t use it after a while.

One fond memory I have is riding in the back end of my oldest brother’s 1965 Barracuda. If you don’t know what they looked like, they had a big, sloped rear window. I remember my younger brother and I would lay back there and pretend we were in a military airplane. One of us would say, “Pilot to bombardier. We are over the target area.” The other would reply, “Bombs away!” and we’d whistle to simulate the bombs falling and then make the explosion noises as we made a direct hit.  That was one of the few times that the trip was too short and coming in for a landing was not welcome. 

I want to be more like that little girl in the back of the van, in whose world traffic jams are not a problem and can even be fun. Maybe I should start smiling at people and waving to them. If they don’t smile and wave back, I can always pretend I’m flying high above the traffic in my B-52. Bombs away!

No Playing Ball in the House

On Mother’s Day, while visiting with my wife’s family one of my nephews was kicking a ball against the wall inside the house. He wasn’t kicking it too hard and it was one of those $2.99 lightweight balls, but I found myself telling him that he shouldn’t be doing that inside the house. As is usually the case when an “old” guy tells a young kid who is not their own to do something, he completely ignored me and kept on kicking the ball against the wall. To my relief, his mother told him to stop a few minutes later.

One of the rules in my house growing up was that there was no ball playing in the house. That meant no ball of any kind could be thrown, tossed, hiked, passed, shot or in any way made to fly through the air. We were allowed to roll a ball, but that got out of hand at times, too, and that was usually shut down quickly. We had a nice yard to play in so why did we need to play ball in the house? Because it could be a lot of fun. Remember, this was before the days of 100+ channels on cable and we only had about five or six channels, so sometimes we had to make up our own fun. Putting on our baseball gloves and throwing a ball from couch to rocking chair to the spot next to the fireplace could be a lot of fun, especially when you looked one way and threw the other. Tossing a football back and forth over my sister’s head was always quite entertaining, too.

Inevitably, though, someone would make an errant throw and something would get knocked over, or someone would throw a little too hard and someone else would get hit in the face, or the football would go a little too close to my sister’s head and she’d yell and scream, and Mom would put an end to the game. So at some point Dad laid down the law and there was not supposed to be any more ball playing in the house. I say “not supposed to be” because we were typical boys and still played ball in the house – as long as Dad wasn’t around. We wouldn’t have dared do it right in front of him.

One time, one of my brothers and I were tossing a wiffle ball back and forth. We weren’t hitting the ball; we were just tossing it easily back and forth to one another. We had the TV on and were throwing it occasionally while we watched the show. At some point, I threw the ball to him and he ducked out of the way. The wiffle ball hit the On/Off button of the TV and bounced back to me. We both laughed and went back to watching our show and tossing the ball back and forth. Later on, my brother went to turn off the TV and nothing happened. He pressed the On/Off button again and the TV stayed on. I thought he was kidding so I went over to the TV and pressed the button and got the same result. Now I was getting worried.

My first thought was, “Dad is going to kill me.” For some reason, whenever I did something stupid (quite a lot) or bad (not as much, but enough) I always thought that. Just so you know, as much as I dreaded him coming home at times like that, none of us were ever killed by my father. I told Mom what happened and she didn’t believe me. The big question was how could a wiffle ball break the On/Off button of a TV? She figured I must have been throwing something else. When Dad came home I had to tell him, too, and his response was basically the same as Mom’s: how could a wiffle ball break the TV? Both my brother and I explained multiple times what happened but no one was buying it. Not Dad, not Mom, and not any of my siblings who weren’t there at the time.

So the interrogation stopped and Dad reiterated that there was no ball playing of any kind in the house and life went back to normal. Oh, except for the TV, because we had to unplug it to turn it off and plug it back in to turn it on again. I think we did this for about a year before we got another TV. Apparently, to fix that button cost almost as much as buying a new set, so it never did get repaired. Every once in a while, someone would ask me “what really happened” that day, and as much as I told them how a lousy, stupid, plastic wiffle ball broke the On/Off button, I don’t think any of them believed me. I even started to doubt it myself – and I was there when it happened!

Take it from someone who’s been there and done that, don’t play ball in the house. Not even with a wiffle ball because you just never know what’s going to happen. Besides, no one will believe you broke anything with a plastic ball anyway.

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like...Halloween?

There are some people that decorate their house for everything these days. Decorating for Halloween seems to be getting as big as Christmas. People have lights in their house and outside of their house, they have lawn and tree decorations, and they put them up at the beginning of October. It even looks like people are starting to try to outdo their neighbor, just like they do at Christmas.

There’s a house near me that has candles with orange lights in every window and orange lights in their trees. They also have cob webs, spider webs and bats in their trees, and there are about 10 pumpkins in their yard. Another house I go past on my way to work has lights in the windows and trees, and four interlocking ghosts around the base of a tree, looking like they’re praying to it. A third house has skeletons hanging by their necks and a cardboard cutout tombstone in the front yard. That’s a lot of stuff and it’s all store bought.

I remember the “good old days”, when Halloween was for the kids and mostly by the kids. In my house we used to make our own decorations, some at school and some at home. We would draw and/or color our own jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, bats, skeletons, witches, and other assorted monsters, and hang them up in the front windows. My Dad brought home these huge rolls of paper so we had plenty of it to work on. The paper wasn’t too thick, so we could also trace pictures out of coloring books or magazines and then color them in. We did our best work and then we’d tape them to the front windows. We’d even go outside and admire our work so we could see how awesome it looked from other people’s points of view.

It wasn’t just my family either. Every house with kids had homemade decorations hanging in the windows. As I went around the neighborhood on Halloween night, filling my bag with chocolaty goodness, I checked out the art work, too. I compared and critiqued, and I usually thought ours were the best, but there were a few here and there that were just as good. Not better, but just as good. After all, I thought that we were quite the artistes.

Personally, I think these homemade decorations were way better than what people buy today. Not because they were higher quality, but because the kids did them. Instead of the parents spending hundreds of dollars buying decorations, the kids spent hundreds of minutes making their own decorations. It didn’t matter if you were a great artist or not, most of us weren’t, myself included. The pictures and drawings we put in our windows were ours and we were proud of them.

Another thing about Halloween in the “good old days”: we weren’t trying to scare the snot out of everybody. There were no realistic looking severed limbs or decapitations and there was very little blood and gore. Sure, there were ghosts and Frankensteins, but that’s about as far as it went. I see stuff today that I wouldn’t have wanted to see when I was a kid and wouldn’t have wanted my kids to see when they were little. When I was younger, it was all about the fun and the candy, not the lights and paraphernalia, and certainly not the scare factor. Since Halloween is really for the kids, isn’t that the way it should be?